


Monument

by VisionaryGalaxy



Series: A Thousand Futures of Me and You [78]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Fluff and Angst, I Don't Even Know, I didn't see this coming, I'm Sorry, M/M, Not dialogue heavy, immortal Stephen Strange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-18 04:39:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18113465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VisionaryGalaxy/pseuds/VisionaryGalaxy
Summary: Stephen had figured it out on his sixty-seventh birthday.





	Monument

**Author's Note:**

> I earned this, I haven't written a death fic in forever ;)

   Stephen had figured it out on his sixty-seventh birthday. He had just slipped out of the bed, leaving behind Tony’s warmth and gone to take a quick shower when his eyes had flitted across the mirror, a rare occurrence for him. The sight he was met with, stopped him cold, heart beating a painful rhythm and mind swirling with something akin to panic.

   He recalled making a noise that was downright inhuman, remembered Tony’s voice warm and concerned from the bedroom, remembered the way he had sunk to his knees while heaving breaths into his aching lungs.

   The door had closed and locked on instinct, offering some semblance of privacy to the horror enveloping him at that moment. When the door rattled he knew he said something, must have sounded normal enough for the man to leave him alone because he spent the following twenty minutes huddled on the cold linoleum floor, shaking and trying to warp his head around the sickening realization that he hadn’t aged a day.

   Horror was the first thing he felt. It came over him like a wave, making him crawl to the porcelain toilet bowl and heave several times before finally depositing the contents of his stomach inside. He had wiped at his mouth with a hand that trembled worse then usual, had felt shivers begin to rock his body as thoughts flew through him with nauseating speed.

   He hadn’t aged a day, hadn’t noticed that while Tony’s face grew more haggard, lines digging deep into his skin, and grey hair making itself known, he had been existing as though he were still in his…forties. He nearly threw up again.

   When he was a younger man, he would have been ecstatic, would have studied and declared it to the world that eternity was possible. But he already knew it was, had met the ancient one, had experienced millions of lives by now through his battles to save this planet. Now, in this instance, Stephen saw only the curse he knew it was.

   Tony.

   He would never admit it, but he had begun to fantasize with a cautious kind of hope, about a future where they were old and grey together. Imagined Tony, grey and bowed by years reminiscing on his superhero days and complaining about how the new kids knew nothing. Imagined late night debates in their bed, in some secluded cottage between magic and technology, neither getting ahead but reveling in the words spoken. Envisioned a world where retirement instead of violence stole them away from the world, a quiet place that was just them, together.

   It was a foolish dream and Stephen knew that. The chances of them surviving to an age where it became a possibility was utterly improbable. There was a sliver, however, and that was where Stephen liked to slip away to in his mind on bad days and good days, now though…it was obliterated by the realization that they couldn’t’ grow old together…because Stephen wasn’t aging.

   He panicked. With fingers trembling for an entirely different reason, he summoned a portal directly to the library in Kamar-Taj and managed to stumble through until he was standing in front of Wong.

   The man himself too one look at him with weary, weathered eyes and grimaced. Stephen could see right then and there that Wong had known, all along. He was guided to a rickety old chair in silence, Stephen’s mouth feeling as though it had been sealed shut, a noose around his neck whenever he tried to speak.

   Hands rested on his shoulders, firm and insistent, Wong’s eyes floating in front of his face until he couldn’t look any where else, “I’m sorry Strange.”

   He was, Stephen could see that much but it didn’t stop the volatile anger churning in his stomach, the way his hands curled into fists until the nails broke the scarred skin. It felt like the world ending, but where it was usually accompanied by hope, all he had was the sense of doom, as the end hurtled toward him like a train run out of control.

   “Let me help you.”

   The words didn’t register at first, not until a thick book, dusty but well used was placed in his lap, the ancient script scrawled over the cover, swimming before his eyes.

   “Le me help you.”

\---

   It took four days.

   Four days of radio silence, four days of Tony’s increasingly angry and irate calls fielded by Wong, four days of Peter’s quiet pleading.

   It took one day and one night for Stephen to master the spell in the book, for him to step in front of a mirror and see the beginnings of an aging man. The thought that it was artificial, making him sick to his stomach, even as he slowed it down not to draw suspicion.

   It took him the following three and two more sleepless nights to even consider returning to Tony and Peter, and a future he had no wish to partake in. But he did, because suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, everything came with a sense of urgency.

   He listened obsessively to the messages, to Tony’s worried voice begging to know what was happening, tried to commit it to memory before carefully saving it. His mind circled around and around with the thought that every minute he was here, hiding away at Kamar-Taj, he was missing moments of Tony’s life. Time, something that had seemed insignificant, knowing it would end with his loved ones by his side, was stretching out endlessly in front of him, unknown, lonely, hopeless.

   Yet, there wasn’t enough of it. Stephen woke that final morning with his heart beating fast and a thin layer of sweat on his skin and the thought that his lover’s time was running short. He couldn’t bare to waste another minute, another second.

   He ignored the relief in Wong’s eyes when Stephen made the portal, ignored the twisting in his gut, the sting in his eyes. He stepped through onto the familiar ground of his Sanctuary and into their bedroom, where Tony sat looking exhausted as he stared at a hologram hovering mid-air.

   It took everything in him not to cry, when Tony stared at him in surprise before moving off the bed far faster then his age should allow and yanked him into his embrace, whispering furiously in his ear.

   He didn’t comment when Tony told him he looked tired and unwell, the aging spell doing its job to make him catch up to his lover and didn’t protest when he was guided to the bed, simply tugging Tony down with him, and forcing his lover to lay next to him, head against his chest.

\---

   Stephen was graced with eight more years.

   He never spoke a word of it to Tony, living each moment with a desperate kind of vigour, trying to memorize every little thing he could, terrified that in six or seven thousand years he would forget him.

   Forget the way his eyes scrunch at a difficult problem, the way he would bite his lip when handing a difficult piece of machinery, the steadiness of his gaze when everything went to hell around them. The way he would whisper I love you in the mornings, thinking he was asleep, the way he liked to run his fingers along Stephen’s scars, the way he played with his hair when he was bored, the way he felt inside him, pressing his lips to his.

   As fate would have it, Stephen didn’t lose Tony in a firestorm of debris and violence. He didn’t have to watch him fall from the sky or be crushed in the mud. He didn’t witness the man he love falter before aliens or interdimensional creatures, didn’t watch him bleed out broken and heroic.

   No, Stephen sat in a small uncomfortable plastic chair next to a hospital bed, listening to the steady beeping of his heart and the rush of air as machines kept his lungs inflating. He held Tony’s cool hand, stroking the weathered skin and not bothering to wipe his tears away.

   He spent twenty minutes staring down at his face, remembering. He ran his hands along visible scars, dared not miss an inch of skin, smoothed fingers through his grey hair, kissed his forehead and finally leaned down to whisper in his ear.

   “I’ll see you again, one day. I love you so god damn much,” he choked on a sob before pushing forward. “You better be there waiting for me, because I will spend the rest of my days waiting for you.”

   He ignored the presence of the doctor, the nurse as they pulled the plug. He didn’t stop petting his hair, even as Tony’s chest rose one last time, then between parted lips, exhaled and went still. Stephen had seen and felt death so many times in his life that it should be insignificant, but there was no future, no version of events where this sight, didn’t make his knees shake and his heart ache like every beat was a knife being plunged into his soft flesh.

   He fled.

   He didn’t take a portal home, instead walking out of the doors of the private hospital and sucking in harsh breaths, feeling the magic from the aging spell drain away, back to his time as a younger man. Stephen walked, eyes half closed, playing memory after memory, as painful as it was, focusing on every small detail, wondering how not to forget, how ever many years the future held for him.

   He didn’t stop walking, not even when the sun dipped below the city skyline, not when a chill seeped into his bones, not when his phone buzzed, certainly Peter. Not until, after several hours he found his feet slowing, his head tilting up.

   A sob slipped from his lips as he stared.

   Standing tall into the sky was the Avengers Tower, Tony’s tower. Stephen knew, if he walked thirty more minutes, he would reach a park where a monument stood ever since the snap, for the Avengers that saved them. He knew, that if he looked at his phone, Tony’s loss would be spreading like wildfire and tomorrow there would be millions of people mourning and remembering.

   Stephen sat heavily on a bench, crying in earnest now, even as relief spread through is body. He should never have been afraid of forgetting Tony, because the world would never let him. Anthony Edward Stark was not a man to fade from minds, he was a hero, a saviour, and as long as people lived, he would be in their hearts, their textbooks, their technology, their words, their memories.

   All Stephen had to do was keep the memory of his husband, not his saviour, alive and that suddenly didn’t seem so hard.

**Author's Note:**

> Tony is a monument in himself, just like Robert Downey Jr.


End file.
